Two weeks ago, after a 24-year-old man had his leg twisted in a horrible direction while working at a jobsite and was forced to be transported for medical attention, I sent an email to a work colleague.

"Football sucks so bad," I wrote. "And I can't stop watching it."

With the arrival of this weekend, I will most likely continue to join legions among our civilized society in not only watching but tacitly and actively supporting an industry that routinely injures some of its workers so badly that they cannot return to their jobs for the remainder of the employment year.

The incident mentioned above involved Cameron Meredith, a Chicago-area native who emerged from humble Illinois State to become a productive NFL player. His feel-good story was suspended when the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee was torn in a tangled pileup so gory that the broadcasters threw the proceedings to a commercial break.

A subdued, piano-based version of the rousing "NFL on Fox" theme music was played, reminding us to be solemn.

The good news is that Meredith is expected to make what our sports culture describes as "a full recovery." Even those of us who know nothing about medical science realize that the real good news is that Meredith did not become the modern-day Darryl Stingley.

If you're not old enough to remember the summer of 1978 or have otherwise forgotten Darryl Stingley, he was another Chicago native who established a career as a wide receiver in the NFL. That career came to an end when his neck was broken and his spine compressed in an on-field collision during a preseason game.

Stingley would live the rest of his eventual 55 years as a quadriplegic. The apparently remorseless player who launched himself off the ground to drive his shoulder into a leaping Stingley would write a book titled "They Call Me Assassin." The NFL would wait 32 years to outlaw hits against "defenseless players" that are "delivered to their head or neck area by an opponent with his helmet (including facemask), forearm or shoulder."

Everyone who supports the NFL holds their breath every time a player lies motionless on the field, hoping they're not witnessing the next Darryl Stingley — or Mike Utley or Dennis Byrd. But we've also been educated that what we're witnessing every given Sunday is some degree of brain damage to an unknown number of players, and this damage won't reveal itself for years, to us or them.

And still we watch. Autumn Saturdays find us finishing yard work and relaxing in front of the Big Ten Network. Sundays are built around going to church and praying for peace and then screaming for our guy to hit their guy hard enough to knock at least the ball loose, if not the player from the game.

Why? The reasons are perhaps too many to count, and burned into our cultural DNA. But one big reason was buried within the 2015 film "Concussion," in which Will Smith wrestled with a Nigerian accent while portraying Bennet Omalu, one of the killjoys who had the temerity to reveal our worst-kept secrets about football and brain injury.

Early in the film, as the foreign-born Omalu begins his research by familiarizing himself with American football, his love interest watches highlights of soaring passes spiraling through the air and gazelle-like receivers galloping toward the end zone.

"You should see this, Bennet," she says. "It is, in fact, something beautiful."

Indeed, a great deal of it is. What will it take to preserve the beauty of that sport while protecting our society's magnificent, graceful, powerful sons from harming themselves while playing it?

Even those of us who never played football beyond the park district level or studied medicine beyond reading a WebMD article have a voice in this. Among other reasons, our entertainment dollars directly and indirectly support the non-essential industry of professional football.

Maybe this true collision sport can cut down on the speed and violence of its collisions by eliminating kickoffs and punt returns in some way. Rather than asking the fastest large men in athletics to reach top speed and hit someone, a fair catch will become the rule and not the exception.

Maybe some if not all of the open-field hitting can be taken away at the NFL level by instituting the college- and lower-level rule that a player is down when simply contacting the ground, not from being down "by contact."

Maybe tackling — if it is to survive at all as the basis of non-flag football — has to strictly become something that involves wrapping up an opponent with the arms rather than hitting them with the shoulder pads, which seem to have evolved into weapons more than protective gear.

Expanding on that thought, maybe the game slows down if shoulder pads are smaller. And while it seems counter-intuitive, maybe the game becomes safer if hard-shell helmets are replaced by something meant to prevent blunt-force skull fractures while not being as capable of harming someone else. Maybe something like a boxer's headgear?

But wait — headgear didn't prevent what came to be defined as dementia puglistica, so would it do anything to prevent chronic traumatic encephalopathy? Can the bighorn-sheep ramming along the line of scrimmage ever be legislated into a safe practice?

The questions start to spin around to the point where concern becomes confusion, and we seek the easy way out, if not the solution. And so we turn on the TV at noon on Sunday.

Then there are those who are starting to make harder choices. Earlier this week, ESPN college football analyst Ed Cunningham, a former college and NFL lineman, announced he decided to step away from broadcasting football because he could "no longer be in that cheerleader's spot" because "I just don't think the game is safe for the brain."

Until many, many, many millions more of us stop watching our guilty pleasure, the show will go on as-is.